Old Salt Marketplace

Old Salt Marketplace is Portland's Circus Maximus for food lovers. On the corner of NE Alberta Street and 42nd Avenue, the city’s next great microrestaurant complex of food-focused storefronts squeezes into 6,000 square feet of bare wooden beams. There’s even a farmers market outside on Thursdays. It’s an ambitious undertaking in a neighborhood short on culinary delights. Inside the building, three discrete businesses share rent and resources. The first is Old Salt proper, the building’s inner sanctum, containing a restaurant, meat shop, and takeout deli. In another corner, the Good Keuken culinary school teaches novices to wrangle the unusual cuts sold at the meat counter. Through sliding glass doors, Miss Zumstein’s Cakes & Desserts doles out fresh lemon cream tartlets and hazelnut genoise cakes.